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Alcatel is shedding 1,500 US employees. The move comes less than a week after the troubled telecom company announced it is canning 10,000 European job cuts.

While the announcement has not been made official to world+dog yet, an email was sent yesterday to workers in the company advising them of the cuts, which it blames on the economic slowdown and the need to restructure the business.

In short, Alcatel is restructuring its Transmission business "in light of the slowdown in the US optical networking market", and slimming down its Access Network businesses in both development and support areas. R&D and operations costs are also being chopped. The cost saving measures should be completed by the second quarter of 2002.

The company made a third quarter net loss of E558m on sales of E5,613m (£3,500m), down 18 per cent on the 6,806 million Euro (£4,242m) it booked for the same period last year.

Weak sales in the US and a decline in its handset and submarine businesses were blamed for the losses. Optical networking and data switching were bright spots.

It predicts Q4 operating losses will be comparable to those of this quarter, and expects to make net loss for the full year of E5bn (£3.12 billion). ®